“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it ought to be obvious that the dominant powers and authorities in the United States and other Western countries are either indifferent to the accelerating racial and cultural dispossession of the historic peoples of America and Europe or are actually in favor of it.” — Sam Francis

Among the many good things that paleoconservative Sam Francis left to us was his analysis of the “managerial elite.” Francis drew his understanding of this concept from James Burnham, who in the 1930s moved beyond his Marxist views to offer a competing theory known as the theory of the managerial revolution. In this view, as traditional capitalism and its ruling class passed from the scene, managers—or more properly “technocrats”—would replace them (p. 384). More specifically, it would include “administrators, experts, directing engineers, production executives, propaganda specialists, [and] technocrats” (p. 385).

(All numbered quotes are drawn from Francis’s “Why the American Ruling Class Betrays Its Race and Civilization,” in Race and the American Prospect. See here and here for further reading.)

Francis laid out the problem starkly:

. . . the realities of twentieth and twenty-first century power that do in fact explain what must be one of the most significant and astonishing truths of human history—that an entire ruling class has abandoned and in effect declared war upon the very population and civilization from which it is itself drawn. (p. 377)

Further, he noted, these assaults on whites “are not the results of democratic majority rule or popular consent” (p. 377).

What explains it then? Francis argued that the classical theory of elites, along with James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution, do the job (p. 378). “The two essential characteristics of an elite-ruling class are what may be called Unity and Dominance—unity in that it needs to cohere around its interest and to agree on what its interests are and (in general) how to pursue them, and dominance in that it must be able to make its interests prevail over those of rival groups” (p. 382).

As Francis saw it,

The major common interest that unites the managerial class is its need to extend and perpetuate the demand for the skills and functions on which its power and social rewards depend. The managers pursue that interest by seeking to ensure that the mass organizations they control, which require the skills and functions that only the managers can provide, are preserved and extended. Large corporations must displace and dominate small businesses. A large, centralized, bureaucratic state must displace and dominate small, localized, and decentralized government. Mass media and communications conglomerates and mass universities must displace and dominate smaller, local newspapers, publishers, colleges, and schools. Moreover, the elites that controlled these older and smaller institutions must also be displaced as the ruling class of the larger society and their ideology and cultural values discredited and rejected. (p. 386)

Francis clearly advanced the argument that the managers of these larger institutions are responsible for the destruction of the traditional white societies that came before them. Those old elites “championed traditional religious and moral beliefs and institutions, the importance of the patriarchal family and local community, and the value of national, regional, racial, and ethnic identity, as well as the virtues of the capitalist ethnic—hard work, frugality, personal honesty and integrity, individual initiative, postponement of gratification” (p. 388).

If he was right, then we need not search for another primary cause of the collapse of traditional Western societies. In particular, he offered a competing view to that of Kevin MacDonald and his idea that Jews had unleashed a “culture of critique” on white societies. For Francis, the existence of such a withering critique is not in question; rather, for Francis, the source was and is the managerial elite.

“The managerial ideology,” he wrote, “also demonized the old elite and its institutions and values as ‘obsolete,’ ‘backward,’ ‘repressive,’ ‘exploitative,’ and ‘narrow-minded’” (p. 389). Thus, it had no compunction about destroying the traditional family, local community and religion, or traditional cultural and moral codes. Nor did it have a need for ethnic or racial identities (as far as whites were concerned). In fact, the whole nation-state was superfluous (p. 390).

(I might interject here that since Francis was talking about a historical process not driven by particular racial or ethnic concerns, we would expect similar results from non-white regions which have incorporated the techno-bureaucratic system Francis discussed. Japan and other Asian nations would now fit this mold, yet we observe not even the stirring of any desire to dispossess traditional same-race elites. With a combined population of nearly 200 million, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have substantially adopted modern corporate-bureaucratic structures, yet this has affected their racial composition not at all. China, with its one-billion-plus population, remains overwhelming Han Chinese and also shows no signs of changing.)

That Francis does not attribute this powerful attack on traditional society to be the work of Jews does not mean he saw no role for Jews. On the contrary, he had a very idiosyncratic interpretation of the role Jews played.

In his section “The Agenda of Dispossession,” Francis acknowledged the detailed work done by Kevin MacDonald to document the Jewish role in the dispossession of whites. But for Francis, the Jewish aspiration to cultural and political supremacy over whites is merely fortuitous, for “the Jewish agenda and that of the managerial elite are in this respect perfectly congruent with each other.”

Now a man of Francis’s rare intelligence and insight is not about to downplay the vast role played by Jews in America today. Rather than attributing dominance to this group, however, he takes an alternative tack: “Jews within the managerial elite serve as the cultural vanguard of the managerial class. . . . perform[ing] a support function” (p. 397).

So we’ve reached the crux of the issue: Are Jews subordinate to the (implied) white managerial elite, or are they dominant? This very question divides white nationalists to this day.

Here I will argue that Francis’s belief in Jewish subordination was wrong, but it was intentionally wrong. Put another way, in “Why the American Ruling Class Betrays Its Race and Civilization” and in his other writings, he was writing esoterically because he knew the consequences of writing too candidly about Jewish power.

Consider that Francis noted the new role of managerial bureaucrats in government and the political parties in displacing the previous White, non-Jewish power holders. This new governmental domination is mirrored by that occurring in the universities, foundation, think tanks, national newspapers and magazines, as well as visual mass media. But hasn’t Jewish dominance in these spheres has been so massively documented (by MacDonald, for example) that it would seem “managerial elite” is practically synonymous with “Jewish elite”?

When reading the following list proffered by Francis, does not the informed reader perforce construct a mental image of Jewish dominance: “public bureaucracies, mass labor unions, political parties, mass media, financial institutions, universities, foundations, and other organizations that were immense in size, scale, and technical complexity . . .” (p. 385).

Two institutions that might fall outside the immediate ken of Jewish domination are large corporations involved in manufacturing, and the military (although the last time I checked, Norton Schwartz headed the US Air Force, becoming the third Jew in the top ranks of the military, alongside Lieutenant General Steven Blum, head of the National Guard, and General Robert Magnus, the assistant commandant of the Marines. This is according to The Jewish Forward.)

Unless it wasn’t clear before, the recent economic meltdown has largely proven the dominance of Wall St. capital over individual corporations, particularly those in manufacturing (see this blog for a short description). As for the military, the heavily Jewish neoconservatives have successfully made the US military subordinate to their will. Again, both of these claims need not be demonstrated here for they have been demonstrated so well in other familiar and accessible places.

Francis also listed non-white ethnic and racial groups which are encouraged to openly pursue their own interests, such as the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus and so on. In a footnote, he acknowledged the contribution to Race and the American Prospect made by Kevin MacDonald on the Jewish creation and control of the NAACP. As editor of the book, Francis simply cannot plead ignorance. In the same way that MacDonald shows how the NAACP was a front group in the Jewish assault on white society, so too can we show that many of the other managerial groups cited by Francis have been dominated by Jews. Jews were not and are not merely performing a support function.

A good friend who is following these debates sums up the situation well: “Jewish influence is so pervasive and powerful that other factors can hardly be said to be truly independent. It is not now possible to live in a vacuum, a world that is unaffected by their influence.”

He continues:

I’d like to know what force is larger and more menacing than they are? The only even remotely plausible candidates would quite simply have to be secret societies, because there is no force that is possible to detect in the daylight that is bigger, more powerful, or more menacing. And secret societies are of course notoriously difficult to trace or, in some cases (like the Illuminati) even to prove that they exist. So, to the extent that the Jews are not the tool/pawn of some larger force that is very difficult to verify, it is reasonable to conclude that the Jews are the greatest power in the world today (and the world of the past hundred years). I certainly haven’t seen anything in Francis’s work that has convinced me otherwise.

A similarly well-informed friend adds,

Furthermore, Jews socialize to create a certain elite—the “beheading” of the natural elite. [See my own essay on that topic here.] Their ability to control discourse [as in Israel Shamir’s Masters of Discourse], both through media domination and by destroying individuals such as Irving, Rudolf, Zundel, or organizations like the IHR (they firebombed it), completely distorts public discourse.

It is pointless to argue with philo-Semites of any stripe. Even philo-Semites would be different in the absence of Jews: they’d have to identify a different god to worship and center their lives around!

Again, this position is a common one among those who have studied The Jewish Question at length. Such observers—properly, in my view—have little patience with theories that posit Jews as supporting actors or as people who are overtaken by impersonal forces that supposedly ride herd over us humans.

Sam Francis died nearly five years ago, so he missed the continued rise of the Zionists and neocons, and the transparently Jewish-backed elevation of a non-White to the Presidency, and the present econmic tumult, with its famed minority mortgage meltdown, the bankruptcy of General Motors, and the bailouts to Wall St., followed by the obscene bonuses paid to those bankers. Had he lived, he may indeed have begun to write more openly about The Jewish Problem.

Personally, I sympathize greatly with someone in a situation such as his. He played by the rules, earning advanced degrees at good universities, then went quietly to work in the halls of power, all the while honing his writing skills.

When the time came, he moved to an editorial position at The Washington Times, but as Joe Sobran noted, Sam “stayed at the Times for nine years until he was abruptly fired for speaking (on his own time) at an American Renaissance Conference. The comments in his speech were not at issue. The newspaper objected to his having appeared at the gathering.”

Francis knew the line he was walking and did his best to stay honest to himself and to his readers. He also knew the risks—and paid for taking them.

Still, he had critics among white nationalists who felt he should have done more to expose the threat emanating from the Jewish quarter. One of critics was Victor J. Gerhard, Esq. who posted on VNN this exchange with Francis. Chided for not naming Jews, Francis replied, “You simply cannot go much further than I have already gone and expect to be published at all in anything like mainstream media.”

Gerhard upped the ante, however, demanding of Francis:

Join those on the radical right who are not afraid to tell the whole truth. I am not asking you to do ANYTHING I have not done. I lost my job as an Attorney, I have friends going to jail on made up charges, I’ve had my phone tapped, I get the super search at every airport, but I am a FREE MAN! I also write columns — they don’t get published mainstream, but thousands of people read them. You could do a hundred times better.

I realize this is a lot to ask, but screw the money and respectability. What do I want? White Power! Your entire body of work does little to counter an anti-Jewish explanation of American Politics. I believe almost all you have written; yet it contradicts most of MacDonald not at all. Your writings try to explain why and how this managerial elite became so alienated and hostile to traditional America. It partially explains the alienation, but does little to explain the hostility, the outright hatred, that these elites have for people who are basically members of their family. Only a non-White group could have such hatred for Whites, and such an obsession with their destruction. Only by understanding that the most influential part of the managerial elite is Jewish can one finally understand this contradiction in your work. [emphasis added]

Sam shot back:

I don’t deny that Jews have power — certainly in the media and cultural centers generally and in politics through funding, staffing etc. But Jews are not the ruling class in this country (at least not yet). As in many other societies they form a satellite that provides services for the ruling class (tax collecting in Poland, e.g.), but I think they have little interest in becoming the actual ruling class because they have no interest in that as long as their interests are secured.

My entire body of writings over the last 20–25 years is an explanation of how I disagree with and have a somewhat different view of the world than what is frankly a monomaniacal obsession with an omnipotent Jew. [emphasis in the original]

Again, I appreciate that Francis was in a difficult situation. John Derbyshire described it quite well in a remarkable exchange with Joey Kurtzman, a Jewish editor of the website Jewcy.com, asserting:

So far as the consequences of ticking off Jews are concerned: First, I was making particular reference to respectable rightwing journalism, most especially in the U.S. I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT — not ever again — be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently.

Note that he never says anything about the truth value of such hypothetical remarks; presumably, even true ones that reflect poorly on the Jews would succeed in getting one banished. That is the point.

The fact is, tactics aimed at the protection and advancement of Whites tried till now have not succeeded. They have failed. Consider again the scope of the problem, outlined here by an incredulous Peter Brimelow:

This is a problem which we see throughout the Western world—an unprecedentedly huge influx of non-traditional immigration. The result of this is that every major Western nation will be a minority in its homeland in the foreseeable future. It takes less time in some places and more time in others, but the calculations can easily be made. . . . What’s so amazing about this transformation is that it has no economic benefit for the traditional people of the Western nations that are voluntarily giving up their identity — and their political power.

As Brimelow phrases it, the question then becomes “Why are these countries doing this to themselves if they are not benefiting their native-born — their own people? . . . How can the founding stock of the country have so completely lost control?”

The answer is that the founding stock—and two hundred million other Euro-Americans—have come under the rule of an alien elite, along with the multitude of non-White minorities which that elite has recruited.

A serious study of this process will reveal that rather than the Managerial Revolution as postulated by Burnham or Francis being responsible, it has been a race-centered progression instituted by organized Jewry and by Jews individually. I think of it as a “promote-punish-purge” process in which perceived Jewish interests are always paramount.

Francis was purged because his writings were pro-white, an unacceptable position to Jews because only THEY among powerful groups may promote group integrity. From the time German Jews arrived in America during the 1800s, they have actively pursued this “promote-punish-purge” campaign, boosting Jewish power and influence, while undermining and destroying that of their current main nemesis, Whites.

The list of those pro-Whites punished and purged is long, and it is hard to reconcile the vehemence of the attacks against them with the desire of the managerial elite to gain and hold power. Ford, Lindbergh, Coughlin, Pound, Eliot, McCarthy, Carto, Pierce, Oliver, Duke, Robertson, Buchanan, Sobran, Irving, Gibson, MacDonald. This list goes on.

Meanwhile, the enemies of Whites—mainly drawn from the ranks of White liberals—have been assiduously promoted for over a century. Ted Kennedy, the public face of the 1965 immigration law betrayal, is but an example.

Had Sam Francis been given his threescore years and ten, I suspect he would have come over to the side of more white nationalists on the Jewish Question and I think he would have done so publicly.

Is it not our duty, then, to honor Dr. Francis’s memory by addressing forthrightly the chief problem facing us today?